Free Homicide My Own by Anne Argula Page B

was going to keep my mouth shut.
    “We’re policemen there,” said Odd, then corrected himself, “…police persons.” I wanted to smack him again. “We got here last night, on police business. and it looks like we’ll be going back tomorrow.” All three of the Indians nodded their heads solemnly. Odd threw the ball again for the dog. “Last night, at the tribal police headquarters, I got interested in your case, James’ case…his murder.” They nodded again, in the same way, as though both comments drafted the same water. “Do you mind talking about it?”
    James’ parents took a moment and without looking at each other said, “No,” simultaneously, and our old guide said something in their own language, which in the world is probably spoken by about a hundred and twenty-two people. Whatever he said, it made a hell of an impression on them. I couldn’t take it. I had to ask.
    “I told them this young man used to live here,” said Drinkwater, “before he was the person he is now. I knew him back then.”
    “Why didn’t you say it in English?” My stomach was hurting, like maybe I’d had a bad clam, even though I’d had nothing to eat since frybread, if you don’t count those two nervous bites of pie a la mode.
    “It makes more sense in Shalish,” he said.
    I got it. I knew a little Polish, not enough to explain this, but I knew it would make even less sense in Polish. My mother’s people kept their eyes on the potato, their brogues on the ground. It was the Irish half of me playing havoc with my grasp on reality.
    Odd asked the old couple to tell us about their son, dead these more than thirty years now. The father, whose name was David, said his son’s name was James Coyote. He died when he was seventeen, a senior in the local high school. He was the second oldest of four brothers. Two of his brothers are still on the island, but Warren, the youngest, went to Las Vegas and became a dealer of blackjack. Having said all that, he stopped talking. Either that was all he had to say or all he could say, until refueled with more oxygen.
    “Did he have any enemies?” asked Odd. I don’t know what book he was playing from, but it seemed like a reasonable question.
    The parents looked to our guide, as though he may be better able to field that question. “We are all family here,” he volunteered. “We have our disagreements, but we eat the same food, sleep under the same sky. To kill my son would be to kill your own, to kill yourself. James was killed by a white man.”
    Why was I part of this? I felt embarrassed and ashamed to watch this frail old couple put through this. They had lost a son. I still had a son.
    “Then, did he have any enemies among the whites?” asked Odd.
    “Yes,” said his father, “One.”
    We looked at him dumbly, but it had no effect on him. “And who would that be?” I asked, finally.
    “Someone who did not want him with that girl.”
    If they seemed to know little about their deceased son, they knew nothing at all about his girlfriend, Jeannie Olson. It was a new romance, his first serious girlfriend, revealed to them by one of the brothers, who teased James about it, because she was white and an inch taller than he. They had misgivings about it, not that such a thing had never happened before, to other young people, and even some people not so young, but when it had it created awkward self-consciousness for the couple and contempt from the community and usually ended in shame and regret.
    Our old guide said, “To quote Woody Allen, ‘The heart goes where it wants to go.’”
    I burst out laughing, I couldn’t help it. The old guy smiled. Score one.
    Odd fell into a lazy pattern of throwing the ball for the dog, a question here, a question there. I eased back into the cast off seat of the totalled pickup, relieved that he had not yet opened his arms and cried, “Mom! Dad!” The old guide who claimed to have known him back then had not yet put his finger on who